Quake: Castle of The Damned
by WentzHesselman
Summary: The slipgates have opened up worlds of possibilities, quite literally. But Earth's leaders are getting a taste of the vast evil that is waiting on the other side. So they need mindless killers, Grunts, to do their dirty work and find out what's out there. A fanfic of Quake 1.
1. Part I

Florcita Rocca started killing in fifth grade.

Her little sister had been killed by the 3rd Street Gang, the band of thugs her father belonged to. He bungled up a big job that would have brought in a huge load of cash and street-ready coke.

The gang decided that he would learn that his mistakes affected others.

They taped everything they did to her five-year-old sister. Hours of degrading and humiliating footage recorded over five days. And they forced Flor and her father to watch all of it.

That tiny body that Flor hugged and looked after was on the TV screen, bruised and shaking as man after man took a turn with her.

And then there was a knife. Just like that, her sister stopped crying.

Flor was a mannequin by the end of the footage. She watched her sister's little body go still. Gone. Erased. There was nothing anyone could do about it.

One average school day, Flor was standing in a far corner of the playground where the din of all the other children was distant and she could hear the gentle breeze whisper in her ear. It was a boundary between swingsets and merry-go-rounds and that great big world that pressed up against the chainlink fence. Pale, scraggly weeds crashing against the shore, harboring beer bottles and ruined syringes. Waves of dark buildings that were frozen in their endless tide of evil that had carried her sister out to sea.

Among the litter she found a rusty screwdriver.

There was a red-haired girl with thick glasses that played nearby in her own little world.

Flor buried the screwdriver in the girl's temple. She watched the confusion and the alarm in her magnified blue eyes bounce around and then settle.

Erased.

Nobody found the screwdriver.

It took them way too damn long to find the body. Nobody caught the killer.

Erasing someone was easier than she ever dreamed possible.

In seventh grade, Florcita discovered that as long as men were distracted by her developing body, they wouldn't see a murder weapon even if it was a bicycle horn wrapped in Christmas lights.

The bodies of a few students from her middle school turned up. Boys known to wear the colors of 3rd Street.

Then actual 3rd Street homeboys started turning up dead. The condition of their bodies and their twisted faces announcing that they didn't go peacefully.

The thugs of 3rd Street never caught Florcita. But the police did.

Flor's only regret was that her sentencing to the chair generated so much publicity. The spotlight was not the comfort zone of an assassin.

Perhaps at some dramatic point, when it really counted, she just wanted the 3rd Street gang to know her name.

Now she was a household name. Lit up in every talk show and news outlet for being sentenced to fry at the age of 17, her body count more than twice that number.

No matter how the talking heads babbled, how average Americans tweeted, or whatever moral beef was debated, the days ticked down to her execution.

Days became hours. Hours became minutes.

She sat in a cramped white room with a TV monitor on the wall. It showed the chair that she would be sitting in 15 minutes from now. She never considered how ugly a chair could be. The leather wrist straps looked worn from age. Or perhaps from struggling.

A grungy analog clock ticked away on the wall directly opposite of her.

10 minutes.

They would be coming to get her soon. Wouldn't want to be late to her own execution. After all, it was a matter of national interest.

Heh.

So much talk.

So. Much. Talk.

And what difference did all the talking make? Doing was what got the results, not talking. She was a doer in a world of talkers. For whatever reason rolling up her sleeves and doing what needed to be done was illegal. She didn't get it.

She looked up at the clock and her brow wrinkled. She was due to die in 6 minutes. Perhaps the clock had a bad battery.

No. The time on the screen agreed with the clock.

There was some movement in the execution chamber. Prison personnel getting into position around the chair. Then there was a girl identical to Florcita that was positioned next to the chair.

This marked Flor's first facial expression of the day.

A knowing eye would have picked up on the slight discrepancies. The shape of the chin. The height of the cheekbones. But for the grainy television image, she was Flor's twin.

The girl was guided into the chair as if she were lost. She went too peacefully. Not with resignation, but disorientation. Her head lolled a bit.

3 minutes remained.

Flor's eyes flicked from the TV to the clock to the door. Her doppelganger was strapped in and hooked up.

1 minute.

The girl looked around, as if waiting for someone to tell her what was happening.

30 seconds.

10 seconds.

The lights flickered. The TV picture jumped. A storm of static erupted from the TV as the mic in the grim chamber was overwhelmed.

The girl was dead. Erased.

Florcita stared. Waiting for the world to make a move. Afraid to think that she just experienced the most bizarre and unpredictable Stroke of Luck.

The door opened, the click of the handle like a clap of thunder in her chest. Four prison guards enter the room trailed by a tall bald man in a lab coat. His heavy lidded eyes looked down his pointy beard at her.

"Hello Miss Rocca. You have just been executed. We are going to personally escort you to hell."

He lifted a pistol and fired a silenced shot. There was a sharp pain in her abdomen. She expected to see a bullet wound. Instead a dart protruded from her stomach. She was looking at the small-print digits on the dart when she could no longer read them because her vision blurred and she blacked out.


	2. Part II

Bodies.

Bodies upon bodies. A heap of cold, decaying flesh bristling with flies in the moonlight. Flor was dragging one more corpse across the wooden pier to toss on the pile. She had chucked so many bodies into the lake, that they started to stack and rise up out of the water. They all wore the colors of the 3rd Street Gang, black and gray and white.

She let the carcass ragdoll off the edge. Sure enough, instead of a splash, there was a dull thud. The shaved head fell back, the empty eyes looking up to the stars, the mouth stretched open.

Flor stopped to catch her breath and look at the literal mountain of her work.

A dark shape emerged from the sleepy waters and began to ascend the grisly mound. A tightness set into Flor's chest before she understood what she was seeing. It was a small figure, short and ungainly. It hobbled it's way up to the zenith. Seaweed clung to the long slick hair that hung straight down.

The figure stood on the topmost carcass and looked up at Flor, prompting her to fall to her knees.

White porcelain skin marbled with dark veins, blackened eyes, Flor's murdered sister looked up at her. She was nude, her tiny body spotted with bruises like a leopard cub, especially on her thighs and legs.

"Hello, Flor," Catarina gurgled.

Flor sobbed so hard she looked like she was having convulsions.

Cat looked down at the rotting bodies beneath her feet and looked puzzled.

"Did you do this?"

Flor nodded, biting her knuckles.

"Why?"

"I did it for you."

"How many will it take to bring me back?"

Flor couldn't cry any harder and yet somehow she did.

Cat held out her hand to her big sister.

"Hug me?"

Oh how she wanted to scoop her up and hug her. Hold her. Squeeze that little body.

Something strong wrapped itself around Flor and crushed the breath out of her.

Long, sinewy, and rather phallic shapes emerged from the water and undulated like cobras in the silver moonlight.

Cat frantically looked around and shouted, "He isn't in this pile! He's still alive!"

Flor wanted to ask what she meant, but the slithering appendages kept her from drawing any breath to speak. They pulsated and throbbed with both the rapid rhythm and the violence of male ejaculation.

The source of the tentacles rose out of the water. His features were cast into sharp relief. Bald. Tattoos covering his face and scalp. Thick earthworm lips.

Flor immediately placed him as the last man in the video of Cat's gang rape. The one that cut her throat after he was done with her.

Cat vaulted off into the water.

The thrumming appendages likewise yanked Flor down after her, but she had the strangest sensation of falling upwards. The water was cold.

She awoke.

The air about her was just as cold.

"DORMANCY SEQUENCE INTERRUPTED," said a hollow female voice that was electronically monotone.

Flor was already standing. She could still feel the trembling tendrils around her body, though they weren't there.

The lights were fairly dim and the walls were large panels of corrugated metal. Perhaps aluminum.

There was a man and a woman, both in lab coats. The man held an electronic tablet that made his glasses opaque squares of blue light.

"G-6991 is online and looking good," he mused as he tapped on the tablet.

The woman was a pencil-necked blonde thing with a ponytail and she leaned within an inch of Flor's face. Her first thought was to slap this egghead out of the way. That's when she discovered that she couldn't move.

The girl inspected something around her forehead. She tugged on something that made Flor wince.

"Optimal healing around the frontal conduit."

The man nodded and tapped on his tablet again.

Frontal conduit? Healing?

Flor took a mental inventory of her body and all it's sensations. She didn't feel much of anything besides cold.

"Time to see those motor skills," the man announced as he came forward and the girl stepped aside.

He tapped his tablet and the sensation of electric tendrils shot down Flor's spine and wormed into her limbs. Pulsing, tapping deep into every nerve. It was very uncomfortable.

"Step forward," the girl commanded. Flor didn't obey, but her body did of it's own accord. The electric tentacles puppeting her legs forward, up and down. The only thing that was still under her command was her eyes. The girl had a satisfied, smug look about her when she saw the confused panic welling in Flor's eyes.

"Right arm, raise, rotate, lower," the girl commanded again.

Flor's right arm obeyed the girl. She commanded the same of her left arm.

"Pace in a circle ten steps."

And Flor did.

"Another successful procedure, it seems," the man said into his tablet.

"Why was it in storage for so long?"

Excuse me? It? It? Is she calling me an It?

"Doctor Edison wanted to see it off to the installation personally."

As Flor listened to these two geeks, she caught sight of her reflection in a bay window behind them. There was just enough light to show that something had been done to her.

A helmet covered her head and tubes sprouted from it, a prominent one going straight into her forehead. The rest of her was completely covered in some sort of armor. She couldn't feel where her skin ended and the armor began. All she could feel were the tendrils, the phantom marionette strings, pulsing with parasitic and artificial life.

The man turned to speak a greeting as a third presence came into view. He was tall. He was bald. He was the man that told Flor he was going to personally escort her to hell. The look on his face announced that he had come to make good on that promise.

He slowly looked at the other two eggheads and they both nodded and took their leave. The man handed the tablet to the taller labcoat.

He sauntered up to her with a look that communicated so many things that Flor couldn't translate. None of them were good.

"Florcita Luli Rocca," he boomed.

"I am Dr. Virgil Edison. I am the architect of your damnation. Yes, I realize that sounds dramatic."

His eyes roamed her body. He dragged a long finger across the armor that housed her breasts.

"If your body had not been permanently fused with your outfit, I could have my way with you and you would not be able to so much as scream."

A dark fury kindled in her eyes and this made him smile.

"You're not Miss Rocca anymore. You're G-6991. G for Grunt, in case you were wondering. The Defense branch of the US is heavily invested in Artificial Intelligence. But constructing machines that can fight in place of a soldier takes trillions of dollars to raise. It's far easier to hack the brain of a living person and give them a few enhancements so that don't die on the first hit in combat.

There are some obvious quandaries regarding ethics. But it's far more ethical to hack the brain of someone that's already used to mass murder, than someone that's never killed anything larger than a fly.

You, Miss Rocca. What a prize of such a specimen."

He began stroking her neck and tracing the seams of tubes that protruded just underneath her jaw.

"When I heard that you were behind all those deaths, and that you were headed for capital punishment. I knew that I had found my Azrael. My Death Angel. We had just worked out most of the snags of the Grunt project. It was ripe for you. You killed readily of your own free will before. Now, if you kill, it will be when I say. Who I say. You are the most perfect, most elegant axe an executioner could swing."

His finger traced her jawline and teased her lower lip.

"I'm sending you straight into Hell itself. There are treasures in Hell beyond anyone's wildest imaginations. They need to be stolen. They need to be protected. That's why we need fearless machines that nobody will ever miss."

He pressed his wrinkled lips to hers. His close-cropped beard prickled her skin. He looked ardently into her eyes for a long, long time.

He stepped back and picked up something from a nearby shelf that looked like a firearm's magazine.

"These are your meals for the next thirty days. Your armor will automatically inject them intravenously."

He slid the magazine into some part of her armor by her right ribs.

"They won't keep you from feeling hungry, but they will keep you from starving. It's optimal nutrition, actually."

He grinned at her.

"You hate me, don't you?"

Her dilated pupils answered loud and clear.

"No matter. I'm going to show you the first treasure Hell has given us."


End file.
